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Bud and Vicky Harris – Still Work to be Done in Green Bay

Earlier this year UW-Green Bay Emeritus Professor Bud Harris and former UW Sea Grant researcher Vicky Harris released what was described as the “capstone” of their careers, State of the Bay: The Condition of the Bay of Green Bay/Lake Michigan 2013.

It was the first report on the ecological health of the bay in 20 years, and it was a good news/bad news report.

“What we put together is just the facts of what we have seen in terms of indicators of the health of the system. That’s what State of the Bay was about,” Bud Harris said. “The improvements were important because what we have to keep thinking about here is change. Change is natural and normal. There have been changes that you might call natural. And other changes that have been induced.”

The good news? The most important piece of the puzzle since the last survey of water quality in 1993 is the largest PCB river remediation effort in the world on the Fox River, which has a dominant influence on the overall water quality and ecology of Green Bay.

“The so-called Green Bay cleanup, which was specifically targeted at PCBs, that’s been a success and an important effort to rehabilitate the natural system,” Bud said.

The bad news? Nutrient loading of the system continues unabated.

“There have been efforts to reduce nutrients but they have been ineffective,” Bud said. “So we have to try to deal with the future. Climate change is with us. It’s going to drive nutrient loading in that system even more than it does now. And we have to anticipate that.”

“There are many good news stories,” Vicky Harris said, mentioning that even in negatives can come some positives.

While invasive species have been identified as one of the top threats to the health of the system, two invasive mussels have brought waterfowl back to Green Bay.

In the 1970s a peak duck count was 20,000 ducks.

“Another survey done in the mid-1990s, after the arrival of zebra mussels (quagga mussels still hadn’t been introduced into Green Bay) the number of diving ducks increased wildly. We had two million diving ducks,” she said. “The mussels provided a really abundant food source and are readily available close to shore. Now there are up to nine million diving ducks these days. Hunters are just ecstatic. Green Bay is now back on the top of the list of duck hunting destinations for a lot of hunters.”

She points out that improvements don’t happen overnight.

“This system was near dead,” Vicky said. “The river and the lower bay had almost no oxygen back in the ’60s and into the early ’70s, and then the clean water act came along with industrial waste treatment, oxygen returned to the river. Now we have this world-class walleye fishery. These are things that have taken a long time to accomplish. In fact it spans an entire career for some professionals, like us. When I first started out, PCBs were just discovered, and it took 30 years to get the clean up really well under way.”

The Harrises are retired now, but continue to be involved in groups interested in water quality, including Vicky serving as co-chair of the Lake Michigan Forum, a group dedicated to promoting the health of Lake Michigan. They are confident the next generation of researchers will continue their efforts.

“It takes time to gather information to know what to do and how to do it well,” Vicky said. “The fact that we were able to do this report required long-term research and monitoring programs going on in the Green Bay area with the same kind of information that you could track through the years. Without those programs, the ability to continue to track changes and know what’s going on in the system would be in jeopardy. There is a need for continued monitoring. It’s one of the first things cut from budgets when things get tight, but they really are important for long-term information, and also to let us know restoration efforts are successful.”

“It all goes back to sustainability,” Bud said. “It’s valuing and protecting the natural systems that sustain life, including humans. We need to keep thinking about sustainability. Your focus on that is right on. It’s a message we have to keep talking about.”